I’ve read about and walked through the environment and history of my beloved Nebraska and Kansas Republican River Valley. I’ve developed, challenged, and deepened my characters. The result? Seven Kinds of Rain is a story about the early 20th-Century Great Plains, about marginalized people who struggle to survive. It’s also about how, by reconsidering history, we can make the world a better place today.

What About that Bird? And Is That a Tornado?

Now, a little background for the cover design. The magpie represents not only actual birds who appear in the story, but also Magpie, a significant and powerful figure in Pawnee culture and legends. Magpie also becomes the nickname for a character, Margaret Rose. The window and wall where Magpie perches represent an inside view of the riverside treehouse where the three children gather. The storm clouds in the distance and the descending tornado signify the importance of rain and weather disasters in the characters’ interests, in the plot and in Great Plains history. As for the title, I’ll leave you to read the book to find out what that means. I can’t tell you everything!

Writing Brings Change

Since my first novel’s publication in 2013, I’ve become more deeply committed to this writing life. I’ve met people who’ve read The Darkwater Liar’s Account, and they’ve overwhelmed me with their love and support. I’ve made countless friends through Women Writing the West, strong writers who’ve improved my writing and galvanized my commitment to telling stories of the Great Plains and the American West. You can learn more about that here.

Available Now, for Your Imagination

Book marketing is harder than writing, and much less fun. The shameless self-promotion involved is embarrassing at times, and I’m no social media whiz. Yet, I’d like to invite you, gentle reader, to take a chance on my novel, Seven Kinds of Rain, River Saga Book One. And then, if you like it, recommend it to a friend or leave a brief review online (amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, or Goodreads.). The number of words doesn’t matter…as in so many things, it’s just showing up that counts.

You can preorder Seven Kinds of Rain now online (CreateSpace, Amazon or Barnes and Noble), if you like to shop that way. It’s also available through Ingram’s bookstore distribution service, if you prefer to shop at your local bookstore on or after July 1, which I strongly encourage you to do. I love bookstores. I need bookstores, and so do you. So please spend money there whenever you can.

But Wait…There’s More Coming!

I hope you’ll read and enjoy Margaret Rose, Jack and Kuruk. They’ve become some of my favorite people, so much so that I had to give them another book to live in, along with more changes in the weather. You’ll read more about them in Seven Kinds of Rain‘s sequel, for now mysteriously subtitled Book Two of the River Saga. I’ll announce that novel’s full title later. I’m hard at work on the sequel’s rewrite (meaning the full story’s on paper, undergoing quality reconstruction.) I intend to publish River Saga Book Two in January of 2017, so you won’t have long to wait for more of the same characters you’ll come to know in Seven Kinds of Rain.

For those of you who are already ordering, reading and reviewing Seven Kinds of Rain, thank you for your interest and kind comments. I treasure you, my readers. I hope my writing will be some of your best summer reading.

Thirty years ago, I was a young mother with two preschool children, one of them less than a year old. The necessities of life transplanted me to a tiny house in a tiny South Dakota town, where I was lonely and exhausted, with a touch of the postpartum blues. There were cloth diapers to wash, a home to maintain on a shoestring, cheap meals to prepare, a baby to nurse, kids crying and laughing, me crying and laughing and not one friend within a 500 mile radius. Life took a special sort of patience, then.

It was a good, messy, joyful and hard time, and I sensed even then that my children would bring me a lifetime of rewards. Yet, in the midst of it all, something was missing, specifically the creative writing process that inspired me as a college student. In a life-changing moment of temporary insanity, I resolved to add fiction writing to my hectic days.

So at five a.m., while everyone else slept, I would seclude myself in our little enclosed front porch. There were no heat vents out there and the chill poured off the old storm windows, requiring socks, sweaters and, if memory serves me, a blanket over my shoulders. I wrote for a while by hand, then bought a used typewriter (a major investment in those lean days). Between ideas, I’d sit looking at my reflection in the glass (which is all you can see at five a.m. in South Dakota in winter, in case you wondered) and make up stories. Some were long and some were short, and few were notably good. But I knew I ‘d learn, if I didn’t give up.

In order to have something else to look at besides my own ghostly pre-dawn image, I took a 3×5 piece of notepaper and wrote on it a quote from Gustave Flaubert.

Talent is a long patience.

I taped that quote to the woodwork between the windows above the typewriter. Of course, the day I copied it down, I didn’t imagine how long my patience would need to be, to become the writer I hoped to become. And yet, I was already a writer from those first days, because I was putting down stories, editing them and sending them out.

This was back when we ambitious, wordy folks with delusions of publication typed stories on paper and sent them through the mail. With stamps. You know, to publishers and editors, who sent back rejection letters. If you remember, you probably did it, too. I looked forward to the rejections and those mostly-kind editors sent many, but I kept writing. I took pride in having been gently, even personally, rejected by some of the best publishing houses in New York. Yes, a personal rejection with a note of encouragement went a long way, in those days. I even had a close call, coming a hair’s breadth from having a short story published in Redbook. An agent represented my second novel manuscript, and I felt discouraged when that story didn’t become a book. Now I’m glad it didn’t. It wasn’t ready and neither was I! But I kept writing, and more short stories and novel manuscripts followed, along with skill and confidence. They were just the practice I needed.

Because practice didn’t put bread on the table, I pursued other lines of work, some quite happily. I went to grad school, studied writing and medicine, ran a home-based writing and graphic design business, learned about the world from different viewpoints and raised my family. Writing fiction and telling stories ran through it all, like an underground river, coursing unseen while sustaining me.

The tools changed . . . I graduated from typewriter to word processor to computer, from dot-matrix to digital printing and from typed letters to email. Publishing changed, too . . . it opened to everyone, even as it became more challenging to land a book contract with traditional publishers.

an occasional payment for words

Inevitably, I changed, as well . . . there were personal problems, life problems and health problems. Unforeseen interruptions appeared to veer me off track, then turned out to be the stuff of life and writing. It’s been quite a time, the past thirty years. Good news, though. Everything got better! (Everything that matters, anyway.) Even my writing skills, apparently, because a few stories found publication in journals and in an anthology, The Arduous Touch: Women’s Voices in Healthcare. Every now and then, a check came my way. I went out on a limb and embraced publishing my own novel, The Darkwater Liar’s Account, in 2013, a grand adventure because talent isn’t only a long patience, it’s being willing to take a risk now and then. I have two more novels sitting on my desk right now. One is en route to an editor, and the other, its sequel, is a completed first draft.

In thirty years, some things haven’t changed, perhaps most notably that I’m still writing. I enjoy research and growing stories out of what I learn, about life on the Great Plains and in the West, history, family life and health. That scrap of note paper with its message is constant, too. Eleven different apartments and homes have housed me since I first taped up that quote. Everywhere I’ve gone, it’s followed. The tape’s changed so often, the paper’s upper edge is tattered as if someone’s been chewing on it. It’s a little wrinkled, too, like me. We’ve both proven ourselves in ways that the twenty-something girl I was wouldn’t have expected, and may have terrified her, had she known.

Talent is a long patience.

As I write this, I look up and it’s there, between the windows in my workshop, over my desk. The words still inspire me. After all this time, I don’t intend to lose them.

Women weren’t specifically encouraged to “Go West” as pioneers in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, but many did, nonetheless. They went as single women, wives, entrepreneurs, investors, farmers and ranchers, including and beyond the stereotypes of madams and soiled doves. (Hollywood’s John Wayne in his Western characters never met most of those women, but if he had, he may have been delighted and a bit intimidated by their strength and spirit.) Some of their genetic and spiritual great-granddaughters, Women Writing the West, gathered in mid-October in Golden, Colorado, at The Golden Hotel and The Table Mountain Inn. I was delighted to join them as a new member. We came not to pan gold or rope steers or run hotels, and not even to brew beer (a nod to Coors, at home in Golden), but to consider what it means to write the history and experience of the West.

Women Writing the West is a nonprofit association of publishers and writers who set down the Western North American experience via journalism, nonfiction articles and books, screenplays, mass media and children’s literature. They write contemporary, literary, historical and romance novels, short stories, and poems, but these categories only begin to describe their artistic ventures. This year was the twentieth anniversary of the organization, and many Founding Members were present for special honors.

This autumn, Golden beckoned farmers, scientists, ranchers, teachers, and even businesswomen, from Canada, Alaska, South Dakota, Virginia, California, Oregon, New York, Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, New Mexico…well, you get the idea. The West lives everywhere.

Key conference speakers included Sandra Dallas, Susan Wittig Albert and Corinne Brown. Panelists led us through sessions as varied as Writing the West for Kids, Women’s Fiction, Place as Character, Self-Publishing, Trends in Publishing, Social Media and Collaboration Strategies. Mystery series author Margaret Coel led an inspiring session, My Journey with the Arapahos, that I’ll never forget. I learned so much, and came away so inspired, it’s hard to sleep at night…but I keep a notepad on the bedside table, to catch ideas.

The Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum hosted the readings by, and reception for, this year’s WILLA/LAURA awards finalists. There were beautiful quilts on display, including the one WWW members made for this 20th Anniversary celebration.

On Friday Night, we met at the American Mountaineering Center to screen a new film, The Cherokee Word for Water, about Wilma Mankiller, the late Native American activist and modern Cherokee Chief. Her husband, producer and director, Charlie Soap, film producer Kristina Kiehl, and the young star who played Wilma in the film, Kimberly Guererro, met with us for a Q & A after the screening. View the film trailer and watch for this amazing story of how a community saved itself with hard work and “gadugi,” soon showing online or in a theater near you.

While the West is a physical region and encompasses an historic era, it truly lives, as one conference writer said, as a state of mind. In the West of the imagination, anything can happen. Fortunes can be won and lost, lives are wagered on a bright future and the wealth of our nation daily expands beyond our founders’ dreams, out where the tumbleweeds roll, the buffalo snort and the silicon harbors data.

Being a woman in the West was always something special, yet usually untold. Many have heard of the Unsinkable Molly Brown, or even Baby Doe Tabor, Colorado’s Silver Queen, who lived in glitter and died in squalor. But if you want to know Grace Robertson, a teenage bride alone on the South Dakota Prairie, read Dawn Wink’s novel, Meadowlark. Karen Casey Fitzjerrell’s Forgiving Effie Beck, which just won the 2014 Will Rogers Gold Medallion Award, leads you through a mystery of a woman gone missing in 1930s Texas. To see frontier justice through a woman named Emilee, read Retribution, by Tammy Hinton, which garnered the 2014 Will Rogers Silver Medallion Award. To learn the secret of the Little House on the Prairie writing process, read Susan Wittig Albert’s A Wilder Rose, about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. For heartwarming Women’s Fiction, try Journey to Sand Castle, by Leslee Breene. If you prefer nonfiction and want to consider health, ecology and the power of connection with the natural world for healing, begin with Susan Tweit’s Walking Nature Home: A Life’s Journey. I met each of these women, and I’m saving more to write about in future posts, as I experience their work.

The highlight of the conference was the women themselves, and I basked in their warm welcome. Their voices, their love of writing and their encouragement inspire me to both live and write more deeply. As Margaret Coel put it in plainspoken Western style, “People tell you all the time what you can’t do. Don’t listen to them.”

On Sunday morning, to send us off in high style, many of us gathered for a High Tea, featuring our best historical costumes. Corinne Brown presented an amazing array of Western women characters telling their stories, deepening my appreciation for our foremothers’ sacrifices and endurance.

The great beauty of the West is in its still-to-be-explored history, changeability and multicultural fabric, reflected in and by this happy gathering of writers and publishers. Among them, this writer has claimed a new homestead.

For a pdf catalog of more great books by and about the Great Plains and West, go to this link and click on the “View the 2015 Catalog” button at mid-page. Take a leisurely walk through wild country…no cowboy boots or turquoise jewelry is required… but then again, they might get you faster service.

My new short story, “Water, Anywhere But Here,” appears in the July/August edition of a very “green,” pdf-only literary journal, The Broadkill Review. This tale is set in New Mexico, one of my favorite places in the world. If you’re in the mood for great poetry and an intriguing interview with author and poet Marge Piercy, you’ll enjoy this issue.

I’ve been following this journal for a while, and I appreciate what the editor, Jamie Brown, assembles for our literary pleasure. I also appreciate that he published my story! This link will take you to a page with subscription information, if you’re in the mood to add another journal to your reading list…this one won’t even add to your straining bookshelf, and will go with you wherever your pdfs can travel; computer, smartphone, tablet…you get the drift.

CreateSpace, Amazon and Kindle Direct apparently conspired to surprise me, and The Darkwater Liar’s Account is now available for purchase as a paperback and in Kindle format. So the “first” release date is now…today, August 9!

Smashwords released various ebook formats on Wednesday, August 14. This includes ePubs, mobi, pdfs and Apple-compatible versions.

It’s my sincere intention to place the paperback in bookstores, as my budget and energy allow. After reading, if you have suggestions of stores that might want to carry the book, please contact me at klynwurthwriter@gmail.com. Bookstores and libraries are very important to me, so as I move forward with marketing, this will be a priority in my independent publishing adventure.

Today, dear readers, I offer a first excerpt from my novel, The Darkwater Liar’s Account, to be released on Wednesday, August 14, one week from today. I will publish links to retailers here and on Facebook on that date, to facilitate your impulse purchase, should you be so inclined.

Now, a taste…the narrator is a London-born woman named Bridget, a former nurse who farms in southern Nebraska in 1968.

Even in my upstairs bedroom, you won’t find the truth at first glance. Not in the gardenia-scattered wallpaper, the pictures tilting off the walls or the hand-quilted eiderdown. Not even in the books on those sagging shelves. It’s the usual stuff, what you’d expect of any farm widow in Too-Small-for-a-U-Turn, Nebraska, not amounting to much. Up until now, you could pitch everything into the burn barrel, drop in a sizzling match and not lose one true thing.

Except for over in the northwest corner, where the bedside table leg stamps down on a dark floorboard. You’ll find no gap around the edges, no hint the board’s loose or any how-to for moving it, only empty nail holes in the skirting board. I found it myself by accident, twenty-some years ago. I stood tiptoe, hanging curtains over the bed, and as I stretched up, it slipped under my left foot. I figured out how to wiggle the skirting board loose. If you push down one end of the floorboard, the other pops up like a Jack-in-the-box. The first time, I thought, what if something’s hidden inside? Worse, what if there’s nothing?

The four of us rattle and echo inside this big old box of a house, just my son Erich, his wife Iris, little Nora and me. Even after Iris’s baby comes in a few months, we’ll knock on doors, wind around hallways and call up and down the stairwells, to find one another. Every day’s like a new game of “hide and seek.” After what happened in the snow, I see clearly that if there’s a safe place in this house, it won’t last.

Back to the spot on the floor. Somebody shaved the tongue off a length of floorboard so he could pry it out, and then finished the hole in cedar, about eighteen inches square. Last, he or she lined the box with a scrap of blue velvet. All complete, years and tens of years before I came. Someone hid the truth. A hank of hair? Maybe jewels or a Klansman’s hood. A bloody knife? Something was too dear to misplace or too horrible to reveal. When I first struck a match to peer inside, the space was as empty as the tomb at Easter dawn. No answers, only secrets—a dry whiff of sweet-sharp cedar, musty heartache and lavender. The space was its own treasure, in those days.

A hungry child, that empty mouth now swallows my secrets, holding them for twenty years. Smudged papers and pictures from my transatlantic voyage. English and German identity documents. Two brass cylinders holding glass capsules of cyanide salts. 9mm ammunition and a Walther P38, loaded, with the safety off and the hammer down.

As mentioned above, The Darkwater Liar’s Account will be available on Amazon.com in both print (paperback) and Kindle format, and on Smashwords.com in a variety of e-reader formats on Wednesday, August 14, 2013. Watch for more excerpts before then. Thanks for your interest!

“There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured. The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick.” Robert A. Heinlein, via The Broadkill Review

Thanks to talented founder, publisher and editor Jamie Brown, for accepting some of my untamed writing for publication in The Broadkill Review. You will find a desert-situated short story, “Water, Anywhere But Here,” in the upcoming July/August 2013 literary journal. I’ll post again when the issue is available. It’s very “green,” and available as a .pdf download for your sustainable consumption and literary pleasure.

This post is short because I’m channeling great creative energy into the book cover, inside copy and myriad details of my upcoming novel, The Darkwater Liar’s Account. Progress indicates that the book will be available in paperback and as an ebook in various formats in September. This, too, I will update as reality intervenes.

Thanks for checking in. Before you go…could you pick up that stick and push that peanut butter and jelly sandwich in here, between the bars? I promise not to bite or scratch. Thanks…a writer does work up an appetite.

Our Iowa summer days seemed long and hot, due to drought, but the season stopped short of our expectations for rainfall and yield. It also held a few surprises. That’s not a cloud towering over the farmhouse by the trees in the picture above, but prime Iowa topsoil in flight; fortunately, it was a short-lived, springtime dust-eater that blew through in less than an hour. It left grit in our teeth and ribbons of black soil strewn across my hardwood floor, blown through the ventilation holes below my sliding glass door. All summer, I hoped for and missed the usual sizzle, crack and wash of thunderstorms. Maybe next year.

In celebration of short things, you might enjoy a (brief) visit to an online literary journal, wigleaf: (very) short fiction. Short fiction, short shorts and even flash fiction (which is not only short, but written in a prescribed period of time)–these are fun-sized fictions for fast people hurtling through long distances, short on time and feeling late. Or, even for you.

Summer’s leaving. We’re experiencing a drought here, as are most of the Great Plains states. Of course, this has nothing to do with my infrequent blog posting these days. I am well-watered and fed, unlike the corn plants I see from my window.

I love to write. I even love to edit, which is an acquired taste. As in drinking whiskey or brandy, revision can involve the same tendency to hold my breath as it burns and the same hope for euphoria, which may or may not come. Although my blog doesn’t reflect it, I’ve been writing and editing during almost every available hour. Keeping momentum, I revise and edit and soon, my current novel will, like a college freshman leaving home for the school year, try to make friends with a literary agent, improve itself and live a life fraught with moral dilemmas.

It’s a big job. There’s not just the novel to write and perfect, but also synopses of varying lengths, sales pitches and query letters tailored to those agents I desire. This is all part of the writing life.

Today I read this wonderful article by Dani Shapiro, “On Living a Writer’s Life.” If you are a writer or if you ever dreamed of being one, you’ll appreciate the romance and the realism of the life she describes. Thanks to Dani for her contribution to my blog today.

I hope you enjoy it. I’ll be in the next room, revising that query letter.

In research for my fiction writing, I use primary sources when available. The internet is a wonderful thing but there are a lot of opinions flashing around, impersonating facts. Because of blatant plagiarism, bias and writers apparently on magic mushrooms, I work to cross-check online information against books, photos, magazines and video from the relevant culture and period.

Scientific American, March 1967

For my novel-in-process, I purchased on eBay a Scientific American (SA) issue dated March, 1967. Reading, I was struck with the scope and depth of the scientific information that, for many people, was everyday reading. Adults and older children sat down in their living rooms with this magazine to expand their understanding of the world, in their free time.

Here are some of the featured articles in this issue:

“Toxic Substances and Ecological Cycles” Yes, people were concerned about the environment then, even before the current “green” marketing barrage. This article concerned radioactive materials and DDT.

“The Heart’s Pacemaker” focuses on the detailed functions of the atrioventricular node and sinus node in the human heart.

“Ancient Ararat” is an expedition into the civilization of Ararat, or Urartu, via archeological finds in Turkey.

“The Surface of the Moon” begins with the subtitle, “Nine spacecraft have provided thousands of close-up pictures of the moon…” and questions the moon’s origin.

“The Origin of the Automobile Engine” in 1876 and how it had progressed since then.

“Advances in Superconducting Magnets” had wide application in research.

Scientific American“The Amateur Scientist”

Two other regular features in SA were “Mathematical Games” and “The Amateur Scientist,” which demanded considerable thought and effort from a reader.

While the magazine topics may seem basic and outdated today, several articles were groundbreaking in that year. You can still connect the relevance of that technology to our current research and concerns.

I ordered this sixty-cent edition (I paid more than sixty cents, but it was still a deal) of Scientific American to check facts related to my novel’s plot because there was no website with that relevant information. Of course, the irony of finding the magazine and purchasing it over the internet does not escape me. It’s just one more reason that the internet will always be my friend–my smart, funny, colorful and distracting friend who will eat up all of my time if I let her…my friend who can give me a false sense of intellectual security because she’ll show me almost anything I ask her to, even if it’s not correct. More, the internet says to me, this isn’t enough. You must look for more. Absolutely. I keep other friendships with libraries, archives and good old printed books.

This magazine from 1967 gave me more than my money’s worth. It is a snapshot of a time, information and its context. It reminds me that unbridled access to knowledge does not equal an education and scratching a surface teaches me nothing about depth. I admire the writers and readers of this 1967 publication for their curiosity and focus because it meant calculating, studying, writing and owning information, the hard way.